Telly host Nicky Campbell has confessed he got out of his head on acid trips and magic mushrooms – and thought he was talking to dead Beatle John Lennon.
The Long Lost Family presenter said he started experimenting with the mind-bending drugs when he was a university student in Aberdeen.
Nicky, 59, revealed: “I took up acting and magic mushrooms. Acting was plunging myself into the minds and actions of others.
“The adrenalin of performing across Scotland with like-minded thrill-seekers and some very talented people was a revelation.
“As indeed were the tantalising hallucinogenic wonders that covered the parks and playing fields.
John Lennon entered Nicky Campbell’s mind during a magic mushroom trip (Image: Bettmann Archive)
“This was another delicious paradox about an Aberdeen so noted for its dour reserve and bitter chills; there if you looked down hard enough was a mind-zonking summer of love.
“Tripping was plunging myself into my own head while also being quite literally out of it.
“I became fascinated by the extreme experience of hallucinogenic journeys into the centre of the deconstructed mind.”
The BBC 5 Live broadcaster made the admission in his new book One of the Family, a memoir of his journey as an adopted child.
He continued: “The irony of trying to find yourself while actually losing yourself was never totally lost on me but nature’s endless bounty beat a pricey night on the beer and through the looking glass was so much more interesting than through the lager glass.
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“Those nights were a tableau of the bizarre as the mundane became magnificent and the unusual out of this world.
“A combination of ‘Red Star Acid’ – making its reportedly heralded return to the city after many a long year’s absence – and mushrooms, ungarnished, and time would be Daliesque, slip-sliding all over the place.”
The former Wheel Of Fortune and Watchdog host described how the drugs warped his mind when he took them and he thought a mate’s “girlfriend looked like a tiger”.
He added: “I went for a pee, which was a curious experience, and on the way back the banister rail turned into a snake.
“As I soaked up the disjointed lines of ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, the lava light shapes shifting and the curtains – nothing to get hung about – opening and closing, John Lennon, not long dead, spoke to me.”
Source: Celebrities - dailystar.co.uk
